A schmooze about Jewish education brought to you by The Lookstein Center

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Torah, Maddah and doubt

One issue that was not raised in the recent Torah U'Madda discussion on Lookjed was whether academic study itself is a threat to religious belief. This was the topic of discussion in a recent interview that appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, entitled "Losing Faith: How Scholarship Affects Scholars." In it, four Bible/archaeology scholars were asked whether their professional study in a field that held potential discrepancies with their beliefs affected their religious devotion.

Lawrence Schiffman was the (Orthodox) Jewish representative in this conversation, which is subtitled "2 who did and 2 who didn't." I will let you in on his conclusion (he did not find that his studies led him to lose faith), but the conversation is an interesting one.